The Latest: French scientist reacts to winning Nobel prize

Nobel physics laureate Gerard Mourou says he finds it difficult to describe his emotions at winning.

“It’s something that sort of never happens at this level,” he said in a video released by France‘s Polytechnique school, where he is professor. “I am very, very happy to share this distinction with my former student Donna Strickland and also to share it with Art Ashkin, for whom I have a lot of respect.”

“We invented a technique that made the laser extremely powerful,” he said. “With the technology we have developed, laser power has been increased about a million times, maybe even a billion.”

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2:10 p.m.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has paid tribute to the French co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, saying the award highlights French research and its applications.

Macron tweeted on Tuesday “we are proud of Gerard Mourou”, the 74-year-old co-winner with Arthur Ashkin of the United States and Canada’s Donna Strickland.

The three scientists have been awarded for advances in laser physics.

Strickland and Mourou helped develop short and intense laser pulses that have broad industrial and medical applications.

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1:30 p.m.

Two of Tuesday’s Nobel Prize winners enabled new studies of matter by allowing scientists to produce more powerful bursts of laser light, an official of the American Institute of Physics says.

“We needed a new way to create the peak power of laser pulses,” said Michael Moloney, chief executive officer of the group. The breakthough came with the work of prizewinners Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland, he said.

While laser eye surgery is the most familiar application of their work, it has also let scientists probe fundamental forces acting within matter at very high temperatures and pressures, Moloney said.

The other research honored by the prize — the invention by Arthur Ashkin of a way to use lasers to manipulate tiny objects — has let scientists study how proteins operate in the body and how they interact, Moloney said.

Noting that Strickland is the first woman in 55 years to win a physics Nobel, Moloney said that gap is “way too long.”

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12:45 p.m.

American Arthur Ashkin, one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday, is the oldest person ever named as a laureate for any of the prestigious awards.

At age 96, Ashkin, affiliated with Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, is six years older than Leonid Hurwicz was when he won the economics prize in 2007. The economics winner in 2012, Lloyd Shapley, was 89.

But the economics prize was not part of the awards established by industrialist Alfred Nobel’s will; it was later established by Sweden’s central bank in Nobel’s honor.

The oldest winners of the prizes established by the will were 88 — Doris Lessing for literature and Raymond Davis for physics.

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12:25 p.m.

Nobel laureate Donna Strickland says her first thought on hearing she’d won the physics prize was “it’s crazy.”

Speaking by phone shortly after the announcement was made in Stockholm on Tuesday, Strickland said: “You do always wonder if it’s real.”

The Canadian said she was honored to be one of the small number of female winners of the physics Nobel so far.

“Obviously we need to celebrate women physicists, because we’re out there,” she said.

Strickland added that “hopefully in time it’ll start to move forward at a faster rate, maybe.”

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12:15 p.m.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in physics to Donna Strickland of Canada has ended a drought for women winning any of the prestigious prizes.

Strickland is the first woman to be named a Nobel laureate since 2015. She is also only the third to have won the physics prize — the first was Marie Curie in 1903.

Strickland was named on Tuesday along with scientists from the United States and France for their work with lasers.

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11:45 a.m.

Three scientists from the United States, France and Canada have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in laser physics.

The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded half the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize to Arthur Ashkin of the United States and the other half will be shared by Gerard Mourou of France and Canada’s Donna Strickland.

The academy says Ashkin developed “optical tweezers” that can grab tiny particles such as viruses without damaging them.

Strickland and Mourou helped develop short and intense laser pulses that have broad industrial and medical applications.

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7:15 a.m.

The Nobel Prize for physics honors researchers for discoveries in phenomena as enormous as The Big Bang and as tiny as single particles of light.

This year’s award will be announced Tuesday.

The 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize, which can be shared by as many as three people, is decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Last year’s physics prize went to three Americans who used abstruse theory and ingenious equipment design to detect the faint ripples in the universe called gravitational waves.

On Monday, American James Allison and Japan’s Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel medicine prize for groundbreaking work in fighting cancer with the body’s own immune system.

The Nobel chemistry prize comes Wednesday, followed by the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize, which is not technically a Nobel, will be announced Oct. 8.